Focal Point™

Harvest information

Harvest applications, technologies, standards, systems and data from a variety of sources of record:

• REpresentational State Transfer(REST) integration
• Open Service for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) integration
• Excel import/export
• Web-based portal for form-based input from internal employees and/or external customers
• Email import

Analysis techniques

• Pairwise comparison - Focal Point automatically selects the best pair of elements to compare based on internal algorithms; the end user can rank how much they prefer one choice over the other.
• Investment analysis
• Financial planning using time grid attribute

Dashboard charts

• Roadmaps and Gantt charts—frequently used in project management as illustration of a project schedule that is used to plan, coordinate, and track specific tasks in a project against time. Also used for plotting other organizational resources against a timeline—applications (starting with their field date to their retirement date), technology, etc.
  • Gantt chart histogram - additional insight to an issue can be formed by laying a histogram of resources, costs, etc. underneath and along a timeline of a roadmap tracking a project, application, and so forth
  • Roadmap Dependency Lines
• Bubble chart (also known as XY chart)
  • Stacked XY charts
• Bar chart - a bar chart displays the priorities for a selected view and criterion
  • Stacked bar chart
    • Ranking schemes—In stacked bar charts, the total score for each element is displayed. There are two options to calculate the total score: a) Positive - Negative, wherein the score is calculated as the sum of the priorities of the Maximize criteria minus the sum of the priorities of the Minimize criteria, and b) Positive / Negative, wherein the score is calculated as the sum of the priorities of the Maximize criteria divided by the sum of the priorities of the Minimize criteria.
• Pie chart
• Radar chart
• Waterfall chart

Repository

Focal Point stores data in a central repository that is a database on your choice of PostGresSQL, Oracle, or DB2.

Customizable metamodel

You can customize the metamodel of information captured to add object types, property sets, relationships, and possible values.

Integrations via OSLC and REST

Focal Point embraces and supports both Open Service for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) and REpresentational State Transfer (REST) standards. You can create traceability links between the portfolio and related requirements, change requests, action items, or solution designs in architecture, change management, or requirements tools. A simple right-mouse click enables you to see information in other 'friend' tools across the network and create links to relevant artifacts in them, then see and navigate those links at any time. With OSLC or REST one can create a federated picture of corporate information and helps make Portfolio Management more insightful. Use this traceability to govern delivery management, and align to the DevOps processes of release management, testing, and deployment.